“’The Lumber Merchant and the Chocolate King” was written by Dr. Jack Priestly, a past Principle of Westhill College and is shown on this website with the permission of the
Editors. The Revd Professor Stephen Orchard and Professor J.H.Y. Briggs, of The
Sunday Movement: Studies in the Growth and Decline of Sunday Schools (Studies in
Christian History and Thought; Milton Keynes; ISBN-13: 978-1-84227-363-0 ISBN-10:
1-84227-363-9).’
The Contributions of George Hamilton Archibald and George Cadbury to the
Sunday School Movement in England and Wales
A Journey of Reflection
For one of the participants the weekend did not get off to an auspicious start. It was
Wednesday 19 th
April 1905. George Archibald was tired. For five weeks now he had been on the move, lecturing constantly, often two and sometimes three times a day, including Sundays, indeed, especially on Sundays. But respite was at hand. The conference he was about to attend would be crucial to his plans but at least he would be staying among friends in one place and in comfort for several days. Tomorrow would be
Maundy Thursday and the long Easter weekend lay ahead. There was just the two-hour journey to make from London to Birmingham. He was already at the station, having booked into the Euston Station Hotel. He relaxed and went to bed early. And then:
“When I awakened on Friday morning it was seven minutes to ten! I hesitated a moment, then leaped out of bed, threw on my clothes, rang the porter, paid my bill and flung myself into the train just as it was pulling out of the station. To my consternation
I had got into a compartment reserved for ladies…I had not shaved, my boots were unlaced, my tie was loose and my luggage was half fastened. I made all possible apologies to my fellow travellers and when I arrived I did my best to camouflage my normal appetite.” 1
1 E.A. Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald: Crusader for Youth , Wallington, R.E. Press, 1945.

Perhaps on that train journey he was able to reflect on the events which had led him, a
Canadian-American lumber merchant turned Sunday School Superintendent, to this point at which he was being invited to be the guest of one of the best known and most successful businessmen and benefactors in England, George Cadbury of Bourneville fame.
Archibald was less than a month off his forty-seventh birthday. He was descended from a long line of robust adventurers; enterprise was in the blood. The Archibalds had been among the first Scottish Presbyterian families to migrate to Ulster following the battle of the Boyne in 1690 and again, when the British ruthlessly expelled the French settlers in
1755 from what had been Acadia and re-named Nova Scotia, a later generation of the family had been among the early pioneers, making the hazardous crossing of the Atlantic
Ocean from Londonderry to Halifax. George was among the third generation of that family, not suffering the privations of his grandparents but still with plenty of wildness around him. He was later to begin many of his lectures with the words, “The pity is that not every boy has a primeval forest for his playground…Mine was the most wonderful boyhood a lad ever had.” 2
Besides the endless forests there were the creeks and the rivers, the fishing and the hunting, horse riding and tracking, especially in the threemonth long summer holidays from school. In contrast, Sunday, as he recalled later, was
“an awful day” with narrow, straight-backed pews in the Kirk, services lasting two hours, incomprehensible sermons followed by being kept indoors all afternoon lest the children should, “commit the unpardonable sin of playing games on the Sabbath”. 3
Catastrophe came when the logging mill had been destroyed by fire and the family had migrated to Boston, where thirteen-year old George began his working life as a cash boy earning two dollars a week. It had been a harsh transition for all the family and most members, including George, had moved back to Halifax within three years.
Nevertheless, it had given an impressionable teenager a lasting sympathy for those who suffer the deprivations and street violence of growing up in the inner city. Then had
2 Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 11.
3 Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 24.

followed another great family tragedy in 1873. His older brother Will had been drowned when the ship he had been travelling to Newfoundland to join his Uncle John in starting a new lumber mill had been sunk in a storm off the island. George had taken his brother’s place and within a decade the firm had started to become very profitable. More significantly it was also during that period that George, now married, had also started
Sunday School work, first as a teacher later as a Superintendent.
With financial security increasingly assured it was this activity which had now begun to assume greater and greater significance for him. By the time his uncle had moved the firm to Montreal in 1888, George, now married and with one daughter, had been giving his church based work an ever higher priority and he had soon found himself in charge of the biggest Sunday School in the English speaking, Protestant part of the city. Five years later he had taken the irrevocable decision. With his fortune made he had sold out his share of the business to his uncle, became a man of independent means, and had registered at the School for Christian Workers in Springfield, Massachusetts (later to become incorporated into Hartford Theological College across the State border in
Connecticut). Rejecting all suggestions that he might extend this course in order to become an ordained minister, he had found himself, within a year, back in Montreal as
Provincial Secretary to the Protestant Sunday School Union for the whole of Quebec.
It was in this capacity that he had attended the large International Sunday School
Convention in St. Louis in 1893. There he had started to come into contact with delegates from other countries. It was also a period when new thinking about Education in general was in the air. John Dewey, later to become America’s recognised Educational thinker and reformer, was Archibald’s contemporary, just eighteen months younger. By the mid 1880’s Dewey’s views on progressive education, which stressed student-centred rather then subject-centred schools, and education through activity rather than rote learning, had already begun to permeate American day-school training institutions.
Religious Education, however, had remained largely untouched by them. Archibald now had the one advantage of having been a mature student: his thinking was a generation ahead of that of most of his contemporaries. Moreover, he had found himself swept

along by them, for the basic ideas coincided with his own freedom-loving experiences of childhood and youth. He had started to advocate their practice in his Sunday Schools and his enthusiasm had quickly drawn him to the attention of international figures attending the great triennial international conventions. St. Louis was followed by Boston in 1896 and Atlanta in 1899. In particular, certain members of the British delegation, feeling the need for some new initiative in their own schools and churches, had paid particular attention. An invitation to undertake a lecture tour of major British cities had soon followed and important names were beginning to become interested. One name had been brought to his attention above all others.
Now he was en-route for this particularly crucial meeting which had been arranged by
Frederick Taylor, the Secretary of the Friends’ Firstday (Sunday) School Association. It was being held in the form of an Easter conference, at which he was to be the guest speaker at the home and in the presence of George Cadbury himself, Quaker head of the internationally famous chocolate firm and well-known benefactor.
A Meeting of Minds
While the two men knew one another by reputation it is unlikely that they had any idea of just how much they had in common when Taylor introduced them. There was much more in their backgrounds than either could have realised. They were successful businessmen, both, in that well-worn Victorian phrase, ‘self made men’, who had amassed a great deal of money early in life, Cadbury, of course, far more than Archibald.
But neither had ever seen money-making as an end to itself. For Cadbury this had been quite self-consciously so from the very beginning. His early ambition had been to become a doctor but his father had insisted that he and his older brother should follow him into the family tea business. Both had suffered major setback which nearly lead to failure, and both had recovered from them through their own unassisted endeavours and courage. Taking over the tea business in 1861 both Richard and George Cadbury had known, even then, that its future was in balance. Two years later both brothers had been planning new careers as debts had mounted. But they had moved into cocoa, developing

a new refining and chocolate making process, so that within thirty years the Cadbury firm was using one third of the cocoa beans imported into England. Archibald had recovered from fire and deaths in the family by sheer hard grind. Neither had had any form of higher education or even apprenticeship. Now they discovered that each had lost an elder brother to whom they were deeply attached. In Cadbury’s case the wound was still festering. It was just six years previously that Richard had died while travelling to the
Holy Land in March 1899. A.G. Gardiner, Cadbury’s first biographer, assessed the significance:
‘Each was the compliment of the other. George, intense, original and daring. Richard, the steadying and balancing element.
Together they formed a remarkable combination, and behind the external differences there was a permanent and fundamental unity of aim. Both regarded business as the instrument of disinterested ends’ 4
And it was while the business had still been small, situated within the city and failing, that Richard and George had begun to show their practical concerns for both religion and education. They had quickly realised that many of their workers were illiterate and so they had begin classes, early each weekday to teach reading and writing. The textbook which they had used was the Bible. One thing quickly led to another and the early morning teaching session had begun to culminate in a short service of worship for those who wished to stay and join in.
Before long the brothers had moved their growing business five miles out into the
Warwickshire countryside but the practice had grown with the company until at its peak, around the turn of the century, some 2,200 women workers at Cadbury’s were attending a short service of Christian worship every morning: the men, numbering about one thousand, for reasons not given, did so only on one morning a week.
4 A.G. Gardiner, The Life of George Cadbury , London & New York, Cassell, Undated c. 1928, p. 72

In addition to this Cadbury continued all his life to run his own Sunday School for men and boys back in the inner city where the firm had begun. This involved him rising at
5:30 and leaving his house in Selly Oak before 6:30 a.m. to make the four mile journey into the city either on horseback or on what was to become his famous tricycle. Always he attempted to arrive by seven o’clock, which was the time when breakfast, which he had organised for the men, was served, giving him a chance to socialise informally for half an hour before he began the class.
Gardiner obviously found this activity difficult to characterise. It had no church or denominational connection; it was neither a temperance society nor a church but, he writes, ‘the aims are distinctly religious’. 5
But if, like Gardiner, there were others who felt it was not a proper Sunday School because it had no direct denominational affiliation the Sunday School itself had no doubts. In the millennial year of 1901 George Cadbury had been made President of the British National Sunday School Union, a position which he had taken very seriously but with extreme modesty.
It was the custom of the weekly 24 page broadsheet, The Sunday School Chronicle, to devote the front page of the first issue of every year to a statement by the new President.
However, the headline for the issue of 10 January 1901 is simply “A Chat with Mr.
George Cadbury”. He did not make statements: he conversed. Through a process of question and answer, in which it soon became apparent that all his achievements had to be drawn out of him, we find a seamless wholeness in his thought patterns. There is no distinction made between children and adults but neither is there the slightest hint of condescension. His schools are for people, not just for the young or the poor; indeed they are for himself as well. For he, too, is a learner. Asked about the difficulties of combining the devotional and the commercial at his factory he replies, “We have found the service a check on ourselves. It makes us endeavour to be absolutely just”. 6
We find too that he has little interest in teaching matters of doctrine, more on following
Jesus’ example of storytelling. “We want to emphasise its spiritual character”, he comments and immediately links this to political life. “Wherever the Church has a real
5 Gardiner, Life of George Cadbury , p. 40.
6 Sunday School Chronicle , No: 1371, 10 January 1901, p. 1.

hold there you will find godly politicians which is what the country needs.” There is a crucial point here, however, which Cadbury, in this impromptu interview, failed to acknowledge. It is one to which both he and Archibald were to give much attention later on. For Philip Cliff gives the basic sociological fact about Cadbury’s own city when, at the beginning of his history of the Sunday School movement he notes that, “An examination of the Sunday School statistics indicates a less than 1% return to the immediate membership of the churches over a period of fifty years.” 7 Even when, at the end of his book, he modifies that statement, it is only to state in his conclusions that it has risen to no more than 2.7% by the time of the 1957 survey and that the best that could be found in 1970 was around 4.7%.
8
By these dates, of course, overall church-going figures had begun to fall significantly in the period after Cadbury’s death.
Throughout his presidential year Cadbury continued to feature in the pages of the
Chronicle. It was noted that some 20,000 children visited his house, the Manor, at
Northfield every year for services and informal Sunday School gatherings and that he had built a barn capable of holding seven hundred in case of inclement weather. But perhaps most significantly for the purposes of this study, his year as president showed a greater awareness than before of the need for Sunday School teachers to be trained and it is clear from an article published on 31 March 1901 that he had been making himself conversant with the wider picture. “America is ahead of us”, he commented, “in treating the Sunday
School as an educational institution, while perhaps we are ahead in the stress we lay upon the need for the deep silent work of God in the heart.” 9
While the second part of this statement can be held open to question outside of Cadbury’s own Quaker tradition there was little doubt about the first part, and throughout the year the paper carried continual articles and correspondence on the topic of teacher training. And now one of the chief
American exponents of the Modern Sunday School had called to visit. George Cadbury and George Hamilton Archibald came face to face at the manor house in Northfield,
Birmingham.
7 Sunday School Chronicle , No: 1371, 10 January 1901, p. 1.
8 P. Cliff , The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in England 1780-1980 , Redhill.
National Sunday School Union, 1986, p. 5
9 Sunday School Chronicle , No: 1381, 21 March 1901, p.1.

The Child in the Midst
During that Easter weekend Cadbury listened to Archibald’s lectures, which basically were the ones he had been taking round various centres in England over the previous five weeks. They were about children, about their differences of intelligence and temperament, about their thought worlds of make believe, the place of fantasy, myths and legends in their lives and they were about teachers as teachers. What were the secrets of keeping order, of retaining interest, of using their play for positive advantage in educational activities? Finally they were about organisation and about grading. What were the differences in children of varying ages and how should lessons be adapted to those differences? ‘A child of twelve’ Archibald constantly reiterated ‘is nearer to a person of twenty in mental outlook, than a child of six is to one of twelve.’
10
‘Nice theories’, was Cadbury’s immediate reported comment at the end, ‘but can you really put them into practice?’ 11
It was a challenge that Archibald had been expecting but it was also one which he had no difficulty countering. He already had years of experience behind him and a reputation to support his success. Cadbury’s commission was immediate. There and then he offered Archibald the use of Ruskin Hall as a demonstration School until the school which he was having built on his new village estate of Bourneville was finished and suggested that for immediate teaching assistants he might be able to obtain the help of a group of young men and women who were training at Woodbrook to become Quaker missionaries. The full significance of this latter point was not to appear for some time but it marked the beginning of the world-wide influence of Archibald’s ideas as increasingly his general approach was taken to a growing number of countries around the world. Special attention was also given to aspects of traditional
Sunday School work which had been taken for granted for years or simply never thought about. Sunday Schools were uncomfortable places for children and young people. Either they were perched on adult chairs or squashed together on benches, often in galleries,
10 Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 62.
11 Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 93.

with no tables, paper or writing materials. Silence had long been regarded as a virtue.
Their task as scholars was to listen but not to speak; to be inert rather than be active, just as Archibald himself had had to be on that uncomfortable family pew in Halifax, Nova
Scotia. A total revolution in the whole world of British Sunday Schools began with the acquisition of small chairs and tables, together with sand trays, blackboards, Plasticine, pencils, paper and building blocks. Significantly, however, the syllabus remained the same. It was the Bible but the Bible presented as a story in all its varying literary forms.
Neither Archibald nor Cadbury were fundamentalists. Neither had been to a university, but as Archibald’s biographer daughter recorded, all the lecturers back at Springfield had had what she termed, ‘the modern point of view’. ‘Therefore’, she added, ‘lines of critical enquiry were not new to the family. So it was with satisfaction that we could follow them further at Woodbrook’
12
Again, in discovering Selly Oak the Archibalds had secured yet another advantage commensurate with their general outlook and philosophy. Dr. Rendel
Harris, a noted Biblical scholar who had been offered a lectureship in Biblical Studies at the University of Laden, had turned it down in preference for the post of Director of
Studies at Woodbrook where his Monday lectures attracted great attention. Cadbury’s invitation to stay, then, was to prove decisive and in the case of the Archibald family, permanent although it was to be a decade before anything like a steady state was finally arrived at in the form of substantial and permanent buildings. In the meantime a large house, bearing the nondescript name of West Hill, on the main Bristol Road leading out of Birmingham, was leased; a lecture room built in the garden and a dozen students recruited for a three-month residential course. Two qualified staff, on, Emily Huntley, enticed from a Primary School headship following a regional conference at Southend, were employed under the direction of Archibald to work with his daughter Ethel, herself
Froebel trained. For the first time in England, Sunday School teaching had begun to enter the world of professionalism.
Meanwhile, Archibald saw this only as a physical base. His own work as an itinerant lecturer continued. Rather like John Wesley, he seems to have regarded the whole world as his parish. He began to organise regional conferences throughout the length and
12 Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 99.

breadth of the country while at the same time continuing to make international links via the missionary contacts at Woodbrook. Very soon official figures in the major denominations began to take notice. J.H. Shakespeare, Secretary of the Baptist Union, had already issued a warning to the Free Churches about Sunday School statistics beginning to show trends of a steep decline. At the same time a thorough investigation of the position of Sunday Schools in the Congregational churches was being undertaken by their Young People’s secretary, Melville Harris – later to become a key figure in
Archibald’s enterprise.
Events began to move very quickly culminating in a two-day meeting in Birmingham in
November 1911 which resolved to establish a country-wide centre. It was agreed that the title should be, ‘The national Training Institute for Sunday School Workers’ with two clear aims – ‘to train leaders of work in the moral and religious education of children and young people’ and ‘to carry on experimental research work in the study of psychology of the unfolding life with a view to the formation of correct methods of work in schools.’
13
A major two-day conference was then arranged for the end of March 1912 under the chairmanship of Sir Joseph Rickett, with speakers from a wide range of religious organisations. Unfortunately a major railway strike coincided with the date fixed and many of the London based delegates and speakers experienced travel difficulties.
Nevertheless, three crucial resolutions were passed by this early ecumenical assembly.
The first stressed the necessity of applying the best methods of work in secular education to religious education whereby ‘the spiritual life of the child may be developed and the building of Christ-like character aided.’ The second resolution noted that the overall objective was to found a National Institution for the fuller development of Sunday School work suited to the needs of children at the various stages of their development whilst a third advocated that such intentions required a permanent base for the work, necessitating the erection of suitable buildings.
14
These resolutions were all passed unanimously by the forty-three people present which, despite the rail strike, included three Members of
Parliament and well-known names such as those of Dr. Scott Lidgett, Dr. A.S. Peake,
13 Westhill Minute Book 1, 19 November 1911, Westhill Endowment Trustees, Selly Oak, Birmingham.
14 Westhill Minute Book 1, 28 March 1912, Westhill Endowment Trustees, Selly Oak, Birmingham.

Professor James Moulton and Sir George Macalpine. Two other important statements for the future of Sunday School work in Britain were made at the same meeting. The first confirmed an offer from George Cadbury of a gift consisting of four acres of land for such a building as was being proposed, directly opposite Woodbrook at Selly Oak,
Birmingham. The second resolved that no building work would begin until at least
£8,000 had been raised.
There seems to have been just one unfortunate note: no Church of England or Roman
Catholic delegate had been present. The latter had not been expected but the former had and the National Society was approached to nominate a member for the Council being set up to carry things forward. The formal reply stated, however, that the Society could not send a representative unless, ‘a Church (i.e. as distinct from ‘chapel’) atmosphere in the proposed Institute was guaranteed’ and ‘unless there were a Church Sunday School in which any students could have their practice and observation work.’ This issue was discussed in full at an Executive Committee Meeting in London on 3 rd
July. The rest of the Minute reads,
‘After full consideration of the whole matter we do not see how we can guarantee either a Church atmosphere in the Institute or that a Church Sunday School will be used for practising any more than we can guarantee all other denominational facilities. To attempt such would be to split up the work into sections, instead of which we hope to loose sight of these distinctions as far as possible.’ 15
Perhaps this position on both sides was to be expected. The Anglicans had already set up their own such centre at Blackheath. What does come as a surprise, however, is the immediate response of this committee in its very Minute, following a resolution which was obviously put on the spur of the moment. It reads:
15 Westhill Minute Book 1, 3 July 1912, Westhill Endowment Trustees, Selly Oak, Birmingham.

‘Seeing that we cannot get Church of England co-operation and that, therefore the term ‘National’ seems out of place we decide to abandon the use of the word in our title.’ 16
Two observations immediately spring to mind. First, this was in the period when, for the first and, perhaps, the only time in British history, Nonconformists were in a majority, while the Anglicans, being the Established Church, never for one moment contemplated calling their educational organisation anything other than the National Society. Secondly, the outcome was that the whole enterprise with its lofty, national ambitions for the new twentieth century chose to continue its activities under the name of a suburban villa. It was to remain ‘Westhill’ (albeit now one word) until the end of its existence in 2002 when its new owners, Birmingham University, immediately dropped it.
Archibald, himself, however, spurned any notion of parochialism. He had a base and he never neglected it but at the same time he remained totally committed to the national and international dimensions of his work. Among his early appointments had been an extension tutor, organising twenty or so courses a year throughout the length and breadth of the country. When the Christian Conference Centre at Stanwick opened at Easter 1912
Archibald made the first Easter booking for a Sunday School Teachers Conference that was to become an annual event until 19929, with many visitors coming from overseas.
Archibald, with his family, had meanwhile conducted an invitation lecture and demonstration tour in Australia and New Zealand in 1912, taking in other places en-route.
Nearer home Westhill Kinder-kapel had been opened in the Netherlands by a former student returning from Selly Oak together with a monthly journal, which had the effect of some sixty schools following what was termed the ‘Westhill method’. These were only closed down with the Nazi invasion of 1940 although, even as late as 1995 the effects were still being felt and written about.
17
16 Westhill Minute Book 1 , Minute 6, 3 July 1912, Westhill Endowment Trustees, Selly Oak, Birmingham, p. 34.
17 See J.A. van Merlo-van Kuipers, Westhill geshiendenis en methode , Uitgeverij Boekencentrum,
Zoetmeer, 1995.

In 1913 Archibald, together with his colleagues, played a leading part among 370 British delegates at the 2,500 strong International Convention on Sunday School work being held in Zurich, contributing a session with his team on what he termed, ‘atmosphere’, described as a secret, ‘lying with the leader and in proportion to the control over self and the depth of the hidden life.’ 18 ‘Atmosphere’ was always a key word in Archibald’s vocabulary. It related to the priority of the spiritual over all else, including other recognised qualities such as scholarship. It was to remain a key expression and factor throughout Westhill’s subsequent history, no doubt owing to the Quaker influence of
Woodbrook across the road.
Archibald’s other major contribution to the Sunday School Movement throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century lay in publications. The titles of his earliest writings, such as Bible Lessons for Little Beginners (published privately c. 1900) sound very
‘twee’ to modern ears but he went on to produce, among other works, such titles as The
Power of Play in Child Culture (Sunday School Union, 1905), a small treatise on storytelling graphically entitled, The Danger of Pointing the Moral (Pilgrim Press, 1905) as well as a more substantive volume, The Modern Sunday School: Its Psychology and
Method (Pilgrim Press, 1926). Equally he encouraged others to write, as in the case of
Carey Bonner whose Child Songs with its Foreword by Archibald went through twentytwo editions between 1908 and 1951. In that one page introduction Archibald spelt out his whole basic philosophy.
‘We must help children be children, not adults. The selection of words as well as music from the child’s point of view is an application of a fundamental Kindergarten principle…and if the same principle be carried into all branched of our Sunday and other schools it will free the children from the trammels of adultism which have bound, and are still binding, them fast. This book is an application of that principle.’ 19
18 Sunday School Chronicle , 17 July 1913, pp. 613-615
19 C. Bonner, Child Songs , The Pilgrim Press, London, 1950 [1908].

The first book to come out of Westhill itself from other than Archibald was The Child in the Midst, written in 1916 by Ernest Hayes and going through seven editions up to
1953.
20
Significantly, the strength of the tradition can be seen in the fact that the last book to emerge from the College before it closed was Childhood Studies: A Reader in
Perspectives of Childhood consisting of ten essays from members of staff and associates, edited by Jean and Richard Mills. 21
A Dying Breed
George Cadbury died on 24 October 1922. There were, of course, many tributes, including glowing ones from sections of the press which had fiercely criticised him over the years for his social and political attitudes. Few dwelt on the deep religious motivation behind all his living. His own more radical newspaper, the Daily News (later to become the News Chronicle and to survive into the late 1950’s) did, however include the following notice which was duplicated in the Sunday School Chronicle .
‘The Modern Sunday School movement has lost a valuable friend and benefactor in Mr. George Cadbury. From the beginning of
Mr. George Hamilton Archibald’s work in England, Mr. Cadbury realised its possibilities and gave it his unhesitating support.
Few probably will ever realise all that children and teachers of our schools owe to him. He was not only generous in support of the work. He followed developments with the keenest interest.’ 22
More significant, perhaps, is a simple six-page document written privately by his wife,
Elizabeth Cadbury, after his death. It is discursive rather than analytical but its
20 E. Hayes, The Child in the Midst , Religious Education Press, 1953 [1916].
21 J.M. & R. Mills, (eds.) Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood , Routledge, London and New York, 2000.
22 Sunday School Chronicle , Thursday 9 th November 1922, p. 285.

significance lies in its perceived priorities over a long lifetime. There is little about prestigious projects and nothing about national events. She concentrates on the Cadbury brothers’ motives and on the importance to them of the Adult Sunday School and the daily act of worship in the works. Then towards the end appears the following paragraph describing a scene shortly before George’s death. It could be a commentary on the text,
‘Except you come as a little child’.
‘One morning on one of the last days that George Cadbury was able to go to his office at Bourneville he was walking up Linden
Road past the schools. It was 12 o’clock and the carillon was playing one of his favourite hymns; “I think when I hear that sweet story of old”. He stopped and in a moment was surrounded by children coming out of the school; they pressed round him and he took their hands, with a few words of blessing. Some of those present said they will never forget the impression his loving interest made on them.’ 23
George Archibald continued with unabated enthusiasm for another eight years, recruiting even more students and extending the work throughout Britain and far beyond. He finally retired in 1930 and handed over the Principalship of Westhill to The Rev. Dr.
Basil Yeaxlee, significantly, perhaps, the first ordained clergyman to be on the staff.
24
Archibald had one great surprise still to come. In early April 1935 he received out of the blue a telegram from Connecticut informing him that the Trustees of Hartford Seminary
Foundation wished to award him the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity. His immediate reaction was to say, ‘Surely not for me. I’m a businessman.’ It was the first degree he had ever received and only the fourth such degree that Hartford had ever awarded in its hundred-year history. But he accepted and made what was to be his final trip across the Atlantic. One paragraph of the full citation summarised his achievements:
23 ‘How Did the Garden Grow?’ Unpublished personal memoir of George Cadbury by Elizabeth Cadbury,
Birmingham City Library, MS 466/172/1-6, undated.
24 Equally significantly, perhaps, was the fact that Yeaxlee was also a genuine academic and scholar who, after leaving Westhill, went on to become, for fourteen years, Lecturer in Educational Psychology at
Oxford University.

‘Mr. Archibald, born in Canada, educated in religious education in the United States, and doing his life work in Great Britain, represents in himself an English-speaking union. Competent judges say that no one in these forty years of service has made a larger contribution to church life and work.’
25
George Archibald died at home three and a half years later, on 3 February 1938 from a heart attack. Tributes flowed in and continued to do so for some weeks. The main obituary in the New Chronicle of Christian Education included this assessment of his significance within the Sunday School Movement:
‘During its one hundred and thirty-five years history the National
Sunday School Union has good reason to be proud of the many forward movements it has initiated but it never did a finer piece of work than when it provided a platform for Dr. George Hamilton
Archibald when he came to England thirty six years ago with his vision of a Sunday School Movement that placed the child in the midst. In those days the churches had not realised fully their responsibility for the nation’s youth or, at any rate, they had not tackled the problem in a way that modern conditions demanded.
With his vision and his enthusiasm Dr. Archibald revolutionised the Sunday School Movement.’ 26
Further, on pp. 94 and 95 of the same issue, a full two-page article gives a broader assessment of Archibald’s significance in doing more than any other person to bring
Sunday Schools and their methods into line with mainstream educational practice. On his arrival in 1902 the almost universal norm had been to crowd large numbers of children of all ages together, seating them on uncomfortable backless benches and exhorting them to
25 The New Chronicle , 6 June 1935, p. 35.
26 The New Chronicle , 10 February 1938, p. 86.

just listen. Archibald had begun by something as simple as changing the furniture. Then he had gone on to engage children in the activity of learning, training teachers to know both their Bibles and their child psychology. But his emphasis was never just on learning. It was primarily on spiritual growth, on learning to be, not just to know. Nor was Archibald’s influence confined to Britain or even to the English speaking world.
Philip Cliff, writing his bicentennial history of the Sunday School Movement, begins his chapter on the period 1904 – 1939 with the statement,
‘It would be true to say that this period is dominated by one man and his ideas, ideals, and enthusiasms; a man who, by sheer force of wit, wisdom, common sense and candour, met a need, gave new enterprise to the Movement, and changed the face of Sunday
School in all denominations across the country and the world.’
27
In fact, as this essay has tried to demonstrate, there were, in fact, two men involved, as
Archibald would have been the first to recognise. He, himself acknowledged the fact in his actions, if not in his recorded words. From the mid 1920’s onwards the Archibalds had become regular weekly attenders at Quaker meetings and their daughter had become a full member and missionary of the Society. At the same time the records show that it was English Congregationalists who made the greatest working commitment to the new institution, providing its ministerial Principals and the bulk of its predominantly lay teaching staff until 1971 after which it was successively lead by a Plymouth Brother, an
Anglican priest, and finally, two laymen, one a Methodist, the other a Baptist, but never by a Quaker. Their quietism, however, can easily be wrongly taken by historians to denote an absence of participation, not only in this particular story, but throughout the whole history of the Sunday School movement. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They continued right to the end to serve as governors and Trustees and to be major financial benefactors, never claiming back any share of the proceeds arising from the eventual sale to the University of Birmingham in 2002 but continuing to participate fully
27 Cliff, Rise and Development , p. 205

in the new Trust Fund, which now carries into a new century the ideals established by
Archibald and Cadbury together, stated as:
‘The promotion of Education in a manner which reflects the principles of the Christian Religion and the tradition of the historic Free Churches and the Promotion of Dialogue and
Educational Interchange between the Christian Church and persons of other living faiths.’ 28
A Broader Assessment
This chapter has dealt with a specific historical relationship and series of events within the Sunday School Movement. More details of it and of Westhill’s subsequent history exist elsewhere.
29
However, within this particular narrative lie points of continuing significance regarding children and young people within British church life. For the truth today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, is not only that the British churches face a real internal crisis as they try to look ahead towards the next generation but also that in society at large there is probably a greater ignorance of the Bible than at any time since the reformation. The same is not true to anything like the same extent in the United
States. There, Sunday schools continue to flourish while in Britain the have virtually disappeared for all but the children of a dwindling number of churchgoers within the concept of the ‘young church’, itself the brainchild of one of Archibald’s successors, Rev.
‘Bert’ Hamilton. 30 Is it possible, at least in some part, to account for this out of the story we have been telling? There are, I think, two main points for consideration. Between them Archibald and Cadbury brought together the traditions of the North American
Sunday School Movement and those of Britain. Much of the opposition which Archibald encountered through his work, especially in the early days, largely rose out of a
28 A Guide to Grants for Christian Education , Westhill Endowment Trust, Selly Oak, Birmingham, 2004.
29 See, for example, P. Cliff Rise and Development , C.M. Parker, Westhill, An Informal History of Seventy-
Five Years , Westhill College, 1982, and J.G. Priestly, Westhill College: The Embodiment of a Religious and Educational Ideal , Panorama, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2002, Wolfenbuttel , Germany, pp. 169-184.
30 Rev. H.A. (Bert) Hamilton was Principal of Westhill College, 1945-1954. Philip Cliff’s Rise and
Development of the Sunday School Movement is dedicated to him with the words, ‘father in God to so many, soul friend and visionary.’

widespread Edwardian assumption that the British had nothing to learn from the
Americans and that anyway the history and cultures of the two traditions make them incomparable. That must be questioned, perhaps moreso today than a century ago.
Always there would seem to have been great similarities between the origins of the two
Sunday School Movements. In North America (which includes Canada) as in Britain,
Sunday Schools grew out of basic attempts to overcome poverty and deprivation. In
Britain we are familiar with such names as Robert Raikes and Joseph Lancaster whose schools were committed to the need to cater, as cheaply as possible, for street children whose life prospects were severely limited. In their ragged schools irreligion and illiteracy went almost hand in hand and continued to do so right up into the twentieth century with initiatives like those of George Cadbury where the Bible served as a basic textbook for learning to read. What Archibald himself experienced as a young boy in the back woods of Nova Scotia as well as in the crowded back streets of Boston would have been very recognisable at the time to anyone involved with British Sunday School work.
But there were differences although so subtle as to be unnoticed by most historians. The main one concerned the British obsession with social class. Archibald, as a child, was a member of a poor family but the poverty he had inherited was the poverty of a settler, migrant community which did not regard it as in any way a fixed state of affairs. Sunday
Schools were for everyone in such a community, not only, or even predominantly for the poor. One of Archibald’s attributes, of which he seems to have remained totally unaware, was his absolute classlessness in an Edwardian English environment. By contrast the culture of the British Sunday School Movement had remained almost as class ridden as it had been through the earlier, long Victorian period. It had begun to change but very slowly and one reason for that was because class-consciousness had been one of the raisons d’etere
leading to its mixed and sometimes confused motives. Cliff draws attention to this by quoting a West London Auxiliary Report of 1868, one paragraph of which reads:

‘very many of the Sunday Schools have been undergoing a gradual change for some years; the class of children attending them becoming more respectable in character. While this has its advantages, at the same time it alters to some extent the object and aims of Sunday Schools, which is mainly to look after those children wholly uncared for by their parents and who are found playing about our streets on the Sunday.’ 31 (my italics)
Although working so harmoniously together we see Cadbury and Archibald representing these two sides of the Sunday School Movement. Cadbury stood in the best tradition of
British Christian benevolence. He had risen to great wealth but throughout his life he had used his riches for the benefit of the poor. At the same time he remained rooted within the mores of a dying age. He would not, for example, employ married women in his factory: their place, he insisted, was at home. Marriage meant an automatic end to employment for any of his women workers. Meanwhile he laboured on into old age with his Sunday School work amongst the poorest men in the inner city, concerned with literacy as much as with Gospel, using the latter as a primer for the former.
The Archibald reforms by contrast, pointed to a future where basic literacy could be more and more taken for granted, but religious teaching, by which he meant Christian teaching, could not. It was to receive a tremendous boost from his initiative, but, in retrospect the
American Sunday School Movement, working in a more classless society, has not been nearly as adversely affected by rising affluence and in consequence has not suffered from being left behind as part of working class culture.
The second point for consideration lies in the relationship between Sunday Schools and
Day Schools. Before he arrived in England Archibald had had no experience of religious education taking place anywhere else but in churches. In the United States, then, as now, it was anathema to have religion taught in the state or public schools. By contrast in
England and Wales and despite the Cowper-Temple Clause insisting that ‘no formulary
31 P. Cliff Rise and Development , p. 144.

distinction of any one denomination may be taught’, the Bible was being read daily in all elementary schools. The lessons were dull in the extreme, consisting largely of reading verse at a time round the class first thing in the morning or last thing in the afternoon, but it was there, together with the regular saying of the Lord’s Prayer, and had been since
1870.
To most religious observers this must have seemed to give great advantages to the British scene over against the American one. This was especially so with developing legislation in 1918 and again in 1944 when the special restrictions were totally lifted and Religious
Education was taught within the time-table like any other subject with the one exception now in its favour, that it was compulsory – the only subject by law which must be taught in every state school, both Primary and Secondary. Moreover, the churches became directly involved as partners in the Agreed Syllabus mechanism whereby the content for each local authority was determined by the agreement of four committees, those of the
Church of England, other denominations, the Local Authority and the teachers through their professional organisations. As these latter two nearly always chose their representatives from church members among their professional colleagues there was rarely any dispute.
Archibald, of course, having died some nine years earlier, did not live to see this state of affairs come into being, but it is likely that he would have welcomed it especially as it coincided with the increasing incursion into British society educational thinking of many of the ideas Dewey and others which he had helped to promote. Sixty years on, however, we can now see that it was a false dawn. Far from promoting religious education as
Archibald perceived it the subject has taken a turn that he would have been unable to imagine. Social changes in Britain have meant that it has become a vehicle for social cohesion in a multi-faith society, a way of understanding others’ beliefs but not of confronting ones’ own. That takes place in the synagogue, the mosque, the gudwara, the temple or the church but not in the classroom, where the Secretary of State for Education has recently announced that even atheism must be added to the list.

The problem, however, for British churches is that they are not nearly so geared up to what is termed Children’s Ministry as their American counterparts. Indeed they can be seen as more than a hundred years behind. They are now struggling to fill the gap which extends from individual churches right up into ministerial training. It is very noticeable that in American theological colleges there is a wider breadth of what is thought to constitute ministry and that ‘children’s ministry’ has an established place alongside pastoral ministry as a professional concern. Archibald was able to choose between the two at Springfield Theological College as far back as 1895 when he elected to be ordained as a Pastor. Johnstone describes the principles by which such a School was established within the seminary.
‘It was undenominational in the scope of its service; its teachers and managers represented various evangelical bodies; it was intended in no way to run counter to the work of the theological seminaries…The curriculum included lectures on the Bible,
Christian Doctrine, Ethics, Church History, the organisation and administration of the Sunday School and methods of teaching.’
32
She goes on to comment that the course was based soundly on the teachings of the great educators. A century later it would still be difficult to find such courses of professional training available to British churches. Archibald’s first courses at Westhill were revolutionary but were at most only of some eight weeks duration: most training was done at weekend conferences and that has continued to be the practice. Because of the nature of historical developments professional teachers of religious education in Britain have increasingly been trained for a different role and for quite a different ideology from that of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Moreover, the professional ministry within British churches has rarely recognised Sunday School leaders as colleagues. At most they are seen only as lay assistants. The historical reasons for this difference are not difficult to discern but they have now left British churches terribly exposed within a multi faith environment in which Islamic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and other religious groups have far
32 E. Johnstone, George Hamilton Archibald , p. 58.

more effectively coordinated educational policies for their children than the Christian churches. Teaching about faiths is not the same thing as teaching religion and the former is dependent on the latter. There is urgent need for a new initiative but few signs of one to come.
© Jack Priestly
Archibald, George Hamilton. (undated c. 1925) The Modern Sunday School: Its
Psychology and Method, The Pilgrim Press, London.
Bonner, Carey (1951) Child Songs, The Pilgrim Press, London.
Cliff, Philip B. (1986) The Rise and Development of the Sunday School Movement in
England 1780-1980, National Christian Education Council, Redhill.
Gardiner, A.G. (undated c. 1928) The Life of George Cadbury, Cassell, London and New
York.
Hayes, Ernest, H. (1953) The Child in the Midst, Religious Education Press, Wallington.
Johnstone, Ethel, A. (1945) George Hamilton Archibald: Crusade for Youth, Religious
Education Press, Wallington.
Laqueur, Thomas, W. (1976) Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working
Class Culture 1780-1850, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
Mills, Jean and Richard (edts.), (2000) Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of
Childhood. Routledge, London and New York. (New Chronicle Thursday 10 th
February
1938, p. 86.)
Parker, Constance, M. (1982) Westhill: An Informal History of Seventy-Five Years,
Westhill College, Birmingham.
Priestley, Jack G. (2002) ‘Westhill College: The Embodiment of a Religious and
Educational Ideal’ in Panorama: International Journal of Comparative Religious
Education and Values, Vol. 14, No. 2, Winter 2002.
Van Merlo-van Kuipers, J.A. Westhill: Geschiedenis en methode, Boekencebtrum,
Zoetermeer, Netherlands.
Other Sources

Newspapers
‘The Sunday School Chronicle’, British Library and Birmingham
University Library Special Collections
‘The Sunday School Chronicle and Christian Outlook’, British
Library.
‘The New Chronicle’, British Library.
Unpublished Private Papers
Cadbury, Elizabeth, ‘How Did The Garden Grow’, Birmingham
City Library, MS466/172/1-6
‘Westhill Minute Book’, Westhills Endowment trust, Selly Oak,
Birmingham.